Covid Concealment Shows Why Congress Must Act to Protect Public Health

Secret communications are the sine qua non of spycraft, and surprisingly, they were also quite in vogue at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not too long ago. It’s been six years since Covid-19 arrived on our shores, and from the time we began hearing about this deadly coronavirus, many in the public assumed that the NIH would be working overtime to discover its origins and develop therapies. So it came as a shock to discover that some of the executives at NIH spent a great deal of time trying to cover up what was going on behind closed doors. It’s a sordid tale that proves it’s long past time for Congress to ensure that such potentially dangerous research is subject to the public scrutiny needed to keep Americans safe and experts accountable.

David Morens, special adviser to Anthony Fauci for 20 years, devised strategies for evading the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We know this because Morens — helpfully, if inexplicably — left an email trail explaining how he evaded the law. He told fellow conspirators that he’d been taught by “our foia lady here how to make emails disappear,” even after they’d been subpoenaed. He explained to others how to replace the vowels in people’s names with symbols like the dollar sign. (The virologist Kristian Andersen was referred to as Krist$an And$rs$n to evade getting caught up in FOIA requests.) Those dollar signs are pretty ironic, when you consider that some critics insinuate that a $9 million NIH grant to Andersen in the spring of 2020 is what influenced his decision to flip his original conclusion that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan Lab to instead writing a paper concluding that Covid-19 is categorically “not a laboratory construct.”

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Rand Paul

Rand Paul is a U.S. Senator representing Kentucky.

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Secret communications are the sine qua non of spycraft, and surprisingly, they were also quite in vogue at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not too long ago. It’s been six years since Covid-19 arrived on our shores, and from the time we began hearing about this deadly coronavirus, many in the public assumed that the NIH would be working overtime to discover its origins and develop therapies. So it came as a shock to discover that some of the executives at NIH spent a great deal of time trying to cover up what was going on behind closed doors. It’s a sordid tale that proves it’s long past time for Congress to ensure that such potentially dangerous research is subject to the public scrutiny needed to keep Americans safe and experts accountable.

David Morens, special adviser to Anthony Fauci for 20 years, devised strategies for evading the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We know this because Morens — helpfully, if inexplicably — left an email trail explaining how he evaded the law. He told fellow conspirators that he’d been taught by “our foia lady here how to make emails disappear,” even after they’d been subpoenaed. He explained to others how to replace the vowels in people’s names with symbols like the dollar sign. (The virologist Kristian Andersen was referred to as Krist$an And$rs$n to evade getting caught up in FOIA requests.) Those dollar signs are pretty ironic, when you consider that some critics insinuate that a $9 million NIH grant to Andersen in the spring of 2020 is what influenced his decision to flip his original conclusion that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan Lab to instead writing a paper concluding that Covid-19 is categorically “not a laboratory construct.”